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I commissioned this piece for my cover art. Art and design by Yoann Lossel, original image copyright Easton Press.

At last, the poem only version of Beowulf: A Mostly Modern Verse Translation is up on Amazon!

I’ve enrolled it in KDP Select to see how well it will be picked up by those in the largest slice of the e-book market. Though, more specifically, I am also curious to see how much of it gets read when it’s available for free to those who have a Kindle Unlimited subscription.

Now, this does mean that the book will be exclusively on Amazon. But just for 3 months.

So I’ll be bringing Beowulf: A Mostly Modern Verse Translation to Kobo, Google, and Barnes and Noble (and a few other markets!) in early January of 2020.

Going wide with Beowulf: A Mostly Modern Verse Translation should be much quicker since I’ll just need to unenroll the book from KDP Select, take the version of it that I’ve saved on Draft2Digital, and then publish to multiple markets through that service.

All right. I feel like an explanation is in order. I did miss the last update after all. And it’s June. And this book update marks their entrance in double digits. And there’s still no sign of the damned Beowulf book!

So, somewhat anticlimactically, but completely honestly, the reason for all three of those things is a desire to indulge in my laziness.

With the change to full time work, the dropping away of of the weekly podcast grind until November, and the (successful!) hunt for a new place to live, I made a conscious decision to sit back and chill out for a few weeks. So it was a mental health kind of thing, I wanted to give myself some space.

But now I’m back!

And I am not going to promise any thing about when the poem by itself will be available.

Now, I’ll post here the minute I have the pre-order for the book set up. But, until then, I’m going to focus my free time on completing the formatting and such of my Beowulf and then slowly getting the commentaries together for the complete edition of my translation. With every thing else out of the way (I just need to touch up that review for ATB Publishing‘s upcoming X-Files collection…), I’m confident that I can finally give the poem the focus it deserves and dedicate the energy needed to finish this final leg of my current journey with it.

All that’s left to say is, as always: Thanks for sticking with me through this project!

Unfortunately, the Beowulf book project has been shoved to the back burner over the past two weeks. But, as I shift to full, Monday to Friday, day time work, once I’ve finished that review piece I’m on the hook for, and once I catch up on my podcast duties, I can move it back to the big, super hot front burner.

Given all of that, I still think that I’ll be able to release the poem itself in e-book form by the end of May.

All that said, there’s just one more thing: Thanks for sticking with me through this project!

At least the forward, and those final points for the poem mentioned in the previous post, are. Though that’s enough to delay it for just a little bit longer.

Why?

As it turns out having all of my weekends filled with family and friend stuff, getting a review of an episode of 2005’s Night Stalker together, keeping up with the podcast stuff I do, deciding to change jobs (and mustering the gumption to get my two weeks’ notice into the job I’ll be leaving sooner than later), knowing that my wife and I need to get going on apartment hunting a week ago, and facing down the financial reality in which we’re currently living have all been pretty distracting.

(A randomized rom of the Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past hasn’t been helping things either.)

A Hopeful Plan

Thankfully, May is looking like I should have a little more down time, or at least a much more regular schedule. Given the few things I have left to do to complete this project I want to say that these update posts shouldn’t get past #10.

Shouldn’t.

But I’m still very much trying to integrate my self-publishing work into my current day-to-day and week-to-week routines and habits. And so I could be a little off with that estimate.

Though I do feel pretty confident about having this project wrapped up by the end of May. It definitely feels pretty do-able, generous almost.

But if there’s anything I’ve learned from this process so far, it’s not wise to make promises without a solid basis, and given how much change is coming down the pike for me, I don’t think I have that solid of a basis to work from. So, we’ll see — and I’ll try to finish this up before the end of May.

So, all I’ll say with 100% conviction is this: Thanks for sticking with me through this project!

Life Stuff

Last week I interviewed for a new job, and chose to go in for a paid test shift. That shift was yesterday. I’m almost 100% sure that I’m going to change jobs, but have nonetheless been occupied by the few remaining connections I still feel with my current work and how best to put together and submit my two weeks’ notice.

On Wednesday my grandmother on my dad’s side of the family passed away. We weren’t terribly close, and, honestly, I’ve struggled over the last few days to come up with memories of explicit encouragement or warm moments that we shared. I know that she felt warmly towards all us grandkids, but I just don’t think she was great at expressing it in the ways that TV grandparents had convinced me were, well, standard.

Unfortunately there isn’t a third concrete thing that’s pulled me away from working on the Beowulf book, but the combination of needing to start apartment hunting, needing to research and start editing for the latest episode of Fanthropological, spending time with my wife, making time for friends, and taking a few moments for myself here and there are a great stand-in for such a thing.

However, with all that said all I need to do with the poem is double check that I’ve used the right quotation marks, I’ve actually capitalized every word that comes after a period, and that after every colon comes a capital as well. So it should be released before the next update post on April 25th.

Partial Cover Reveal

Also, having the cover ready definitely helps make that timeline feasible.

Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

I feel like I’ve taken two steps forward, and one step back with this project.

In the last update post I’d stated my hope that I’d be onto the formatting part of the process by the time I was writing this update. Unfortunately, I’m not there yet.

But.

I do have a lot more information about the work that I have left now.

Commentary Clarity

So, for the sake of keeping them clearly organized, I pulled all of my commentaries from this blog into a spreadsheet. Once I’d gathered all of them, they filled 273 rows.

Because of this volume, I decided that it would probably be easier to edit the commentaries in a word document rather than in the awkward view that a spreadsheet offered. So I copied all the commentaries and then pasted them into a new document.

And that document swelled to 466 pages containing 221,322 words.

That’s more words than Moby Dick, it’s longer than Crime and Punishment. Needless to say, those numbers gave me a little pause when I remembered my revised ETA of April 4th.

Then, when I timed how long it took me to edit one commentary, I clocked in at around 10 minutes.

With 273 commentaries, if each takes me 10 minutes, then editing them all will take me about 2,730 minutes or 45 hours and 30 minutes.

Considering that this is just one of the projects I’m working on in my free time, still have a day job and try to maintain a balance with something of a personal life and pure down time, another week will definitely not be enough for me to finish the commentaries.

Finding Myself Halfway Through a Re-Read Through

My read through has turned into a re-read through because as I was wrapping up I realized that I needed to pay way more attention to the rhythm of my lines.

What exactly does that mean?

I’m trying to balance my poem to have lines that are fairly short (maybe seven words on average) that still have the tiny pause called a caesura found in the original Old English. As a result I’m carefully re-reading through the poem with an ear to where that caesura falls and rejiggering lines and adding words as necessary.

The good news? I’m up to book 25 of 42 as of this writing.

When Will It End?

And, to try to set any concern that I’m never going to stop touching up this poem, once I’m finished with this read through I’m going to release the poem by itself. I’ll commission a cover, get the poem formatted into an e-book, and then make it available for sale.

So, if I give myself another week to wrap up that re-read through and then another to get the e-book together, I should be able to release the poem in the middle of April. The release should fall in the same week I’ll be making another one of these posts, actually.

And here’s my swing at the ETA for the complete project.

Keeping the above ETA for the poem alone in mind, I should be able to seriously start in on editing the commentaries in the third week of April. Rounding the estimated time it will take to edit the commentaries up to 46 hours, if I dedicated about 10 hours a week to editing them, I should be able to get them edited after five weeks.

So I should be able to wrap up the commentaries and have them and the complete version of the book released come the fourth week of May (adding an extra week for formatting and buffer).

A Humble Conclusion

I’m really hoping that this is the last time I need to push the release of this project back. It feels like every time I do I’m disappointing the fans of this blog, my readers.

But, luckily, having the numbers I do now and knowing what I know about how much I can realistically do in a week, I think that this will be the last time I push Beowulf further into 2019.

To those fans and readers, all that’s left to say for now is: Thanks for sticking with me through this project!

Though I did have a few solid days off the week after that update went out, I completely forgot that I was on deck for editing that week’s episode of the podcast I’m a part of. If you’re curious, you can listen to that episode (and all the other’s we’ve done here).

Luckily, I was still able to make a good bit of progress all the same. I’m not through with the poem proper just yet (still have another 29 chapters (books?) to go through), but I have gathered all of the commentaries. Now I just need to make sure that all the t’s are crossed and i’s are dotted with them and then that part of the book will be finished.

Linking those commentaries up to the poem is a bit of a different story, though.

I’ve been shuffling some lines around in an effort to improve the rhythm and flow of my translation, as well as its readability on screens that are smaller than a trade paperback’s page. If an original organizing principle of the poem was the line, such a principle for my translation would be the paragraph. (Or perhaps a stanza-graph since this is still a poem?)

In any case, the next week is set to have a similar number of free days as that past golden week was going to. The difference this time, is that I don’t have a podcast to edit.

So, it’s my plan as of this writing to come to the next book update with a story or two about transforming my translation and all of my blogging about this poem into something e-book reading apps will recognize.

But I need to finish the read through and finalize my commentaries first. And I shall.